Monday, October 4. 2010

Sam Harris, famous atheist and scientist, says that we can find morality, what is right and wrong, in science. There is no doubt we use the data science gives to help us determine right from wrong, but is there actually moral judgments to be found in the data itself? Do we need to look no further than science to determine values and ethics?

His new book, “The Moral Landscape,” aims to meet head-on a claim he has often encountered when speaking out against religion: that the scientific worldview he favors has nothing to say on moral questions. That claim often keeps company with the thesis, elaborated by the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, that science and religion have “nonoverlapping magisteria.” The authority of science and the authority of religion cover different domains, Gould thought, and the methods of each are inappropriate for the study of the other’s problems. Religion deals with questions about what Harris calls “meaning, morality and life’s larger purpose,” questions that have no scientific answers.

Harris, who has a doctorate in neuroscience, holds the opposite view. Only science can help us answer these questions, he says. That’s because truths about morality and meaning must “relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures,” and science alone — especially neuroscience, his field — can uncover those facts. So rather than consulting Aristotle or Kant (let alone the Bible or the Koran) about what is necessary for humans to flourish, why not go to the sciences that study conscious mental life?

The "well-being of conscious creatures" is the standard then for right and wrong. And Harris falls into the same trap that many do. How do you define "well-being"? Who gets to define it? Is consciousness a good enough definition to determine worth? What happens if you lose consciousness temporarily or permanently? All questions of philosophy that science cannot answer.

As Kwame Anthony Appiah points out this is just the old philosophy of utilitarianism wrapped up in a new package:

In fact, what he ends up endorsing is something very like utilitarianism, a philosophical position that is now more than two centuries old, and that faces a battery of familiar problems. Even if you accept the basic premise, how do you compare the well-being of different people? Should we aim to increase average well-being (which would mean that a world consisting of one bliss case is better than one with a billion just slightly less blissful people)? Or should we go for a cumulative total of well-being (which might favor a world with zillions of people whose lives are just barely worth living)? If the mental states of conscious beings are what matter, what’s wrong with killing someone in his sleep? How should we weigh present well-being against future well-being?

I find the idea that somehow science has ALL the answers so repugnant. To propose that science is capable of internal moral judgments without help from history, law, religion or philosophy is essentially saying that science doesn't need anyone telling it right from wrong. That scientists can decide that for themsleves what is ethical without any help from the "less scientific" and therefore "less worthy" disciplines. And that, my friends, is like putting a Wall Street CEO in charge of business ethics. Scary. Just like the review on Amazon:

Because there are definite facts to be known about where we fall on this landscape, Harris foresees a time when science will no longer limit itself to merely describing what people do in the name of "morality"; in principle, science should be able to tell us what we ought to do to live the best lives possible.

A world where only science tells me how best to live my life scares me immensely.

In my opinion, science is simply the discovery of our natural world. The data found in that pursuit makes no moral judgments. People do that with a combination of many moral compasses like history, law, religion and philosophy. Anyone, like Harris, who says otherwise is practicing their own religion called Scientism.

I am not sure what drives people like Harris to argue that science can determine morality as surely as it can describe the molecular compound of water. It can’t be atheism. One can be aggressively atheistic and come to carefully considered philosophical conclusions about meaning, morality, and virtue without pretending it is science.

Whatever his motives, Harris appears to be pushing a quasi-religion–faith in science–AKA scientism, perhaps as a way of putting the lid on religion’s coffin. But he is really just promoting his own world view and pretending that it is science. All the fancy talk about letting science decide the right approach to morality is no more than that.

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